Why We Signed The MyData Declaration

On Friday 25th of 2017 Kumbu was among the first organisations to sign the MyData Declaration that aims to empower individuals with their personal data. In this post we’ll discuss what it is and what it means for Kumbu — and more important, for our users.

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What are MYDATA principles?

MyData is a global organisation that aims at providing “individuals with the practical means to access, obtain, and use datasets containing their personal information, such as purchasing data, traffic data, telecommunications data, medical records, financial information and data derived from various online services and to encourage organisations holding personal data to give individuals control over this data, extending beyond their minimum legal requirements to do so.

As the importance of personal data in society continues to expand, it becomes increasingly urgent to make sure individuals are in a position to know and control their personal data, but also to gain personal knowledge from them and to claim their share of their benefits.

Today, the balance of power is massively tilted towards organisations, who alone have the power to collect, trade and make decisions based on personal data, whereas individuals can only hope, if they work hard, to gain some control over what happens with their data. The shifts and principles that we lay out in this Declaration aim at restoring balance and moving towards a human-centric vision of personal data. We believe they are the conditions for a just, sustainable and prosperous digital society whose foundations are:

Trust and confidence, that rest on balanced and fair relationships between people, as well as between people and organisations;

Self-determination, that is achieved, not only by legal protection, but also by proactive actions to share the power of data with individuals;

Maximising the collective benefits of personal data, by fairly sharing them between organisations, individuals and society.”

Why did Kumbu sign the declaration?

Because MyData principles have been core values at Kumbu — since day 1. We actually founded Kumbu to give individuals (and ourselves) a way to safe-keep digital born content and memories that are created online and that people do not know how to save.

It’s a matter of philosophy: everyone at Kumbu strongly believe that the content shared through social networks and any other applications should only belong to its creator — and not to the platform that hosts it. Also, we want to be informed when our data is being used or sold for commercial reasons. And we hate the complexity of Privacy Policies that are made to protect the organization behind it rather than protect or inform the user in a comprehensible form.

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What does it mean for our users?

Since the very beginning, we built Kumbu as a private archiving solution: the concept of Souvenir Box for the Digital Era speaks for itself. Signing the MyData declaration is a step further in informing our users on our intentions but also to advocate and act for a more human centric web.

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Among others, here are our commitments:

Kumbu data is centered around you. You are in full control of that content.You get to choose what to save or not. Humans make the decisions, not algorithms.You own your content. You can download it any time you want. Kumbu content is Secure and PortableWe don’t track users outside of Kumbu. We don’t share nor sell Kumbu usage data with advertisers.We wisely select third party providers used to offer the service and make sure their privacy practices are aligned with our own.We’re committed to informing our users about our data practices regularly.

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Now, this is just the beginning. Adjustments will have to be made constantly and we’re open to every suggestion or remark that will help us reinforce privacy. So don’t hesitate to reach out anytime — hello ( @ )getkumbu.com.